Ricardo Taborda

The companion video1 presents animations and results from a computer simulation of an earthquake scenario of magnitude MW = 7.8, in the San Andreas fault in Southern California. The main objective of such simulations is to gain physical insight of the variability of the ground motion, both in space and time, within a region of interest. While helping us to gain a better understanding of the ground shaking during strong earthquakes, this type of simulations will allow us to improve the seismic provisions in building codes, and will ultimately help save many lives. This is a long term project co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), in which a number of earthquake scenarios will be simulated throughout southern California. We regularly prepare similar animations as simulation results are obtained. A good number of them are available at our project’sWeb site2. This one in particular was especially prepared for the present competition and will also be presented at the 2007 SCEC Annual Meeting, September 8–12, Palm Springs, California. Besides the regular wave propagation animation we have also included an introduction to the problem under study and along the animation itself, we explain some of the interesting phenomena occurring as the earthquake waves travel throughout the region. We analyze the particular response of certain sites and present results that are of remarkable interest to both the seismological and earthquake engineering community. We expect that through this and other animations we will not only gain knowledge from a scientific perspective but we will also help society to better understand these physical phenomena that affect all of us.

Acknowledgments:

This video would have not been possible without the collaboration of Julio L´opez from Carnegie Mellon and John Urbanic from the Pittsburgh Computing Center. We also thank Joyce Bielak as the recording voice. The material in the animation is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. ITR-0326449 and by the Southern California Earthquake Center. SCEC is funded by Cooperative Agreement No. EAR-0106924 and USGS Cooperative Agreement 02HQAG008. The simulations were performed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center under NSF TeraGrid grant MCA04N026P.